A Reference Standard Bibliography: Music Therapy With Children Who Have Experienced Traumatic Brain Injury

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Worldwide, childhood traumatic brain injury is a signif- icant public health issue. There is a strong need for the development and provision of relevant and effective therapeutic interventions for these children. In Ireland, as in most countries, family members are commonly the primary caregivers of children with traumatic brain injury. Directly affected by the consequences of trau- matic brain injury, they have expressed both the huge extent of burden they experience and the demand for a significant increase in effective services to provide for the needs of their children. Advances in medical care have often been accompanied with an expression of dis- satisfaction with the provision of adequate rehabilitative services (Hogan & Smyth, 2003). Music therapists have been developing therapeutic interventions during the past three decades to meet the challenges experienced by children who have traumatic brain injury. An earlier study (Gilbertson & Aldridge, 2003a) has shown that the standard of indexing of music therapy literature is severely unreliable and inaccurate. To alleviate this situ- ation, this article provides an identification strategy for music therapy literature through the example of music therapy and childhood traumatic brain injury. By doing so, the article also provides a reference standard biblio- graphy of published cases of music therapy with children who have experienced traumatic brain injury. The potential implications of the creation of reference stan- dard bibliographies in other areas of the application of music therapy are discussed.